Upon entering the massive carved wooden doors of the Palafoxiana Library, one is struck by the rich Old World scent of fine furniture and leather-bound books. The morning sun beams through the windows of a high vaulted ceiling, playing off the voluptuous baroque ornament of the three-tiered...Read more

Commissioned by Doña Elvira Maria de Vilhena, Countess of Pontével (1627–1718) and consecrated on the sixth of September, 1708, the church of Nossa Senhora da Encarnação (Our Lady of the Incarnation) in the heart of Lisbon is among the most splendid Baroque churches in a city known for its...Read more

For nearly four centuries, adherents of Greek Catholicism, a branch of the Eastern Orthodox church that united with the Roman Catholic church, have sought refuge in an extraordinary, yet little known, suite of sanctuaries that dot the Carpathian Mountains of Central Europe. Though simple in form,...Read more

A bedded sandstone ridge that rises some 500 meters above the parched sands of Western Sahara, the Bandiagara Escarpment has served as a cultural crossroads for more than 2,000 years. The eroded remnants of a Precambrian massif, the 200-kilometer-long formation snakes its way across the landscape...Read more

The future of Strawberry Hill, the “little Gothic castle” created by Horace Walpole in the eighteenth century, is looking decidedly brighter thanks to a £4.6 million grant which has been earmarked by the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF). The award to the Strawberry Hill Trust along with £370,000...Read more

Ruins form every time technologies requiring vast architecture go obsolete, or civilizations abandon remotest edges of settlements or deplete land beyond habitability or give up on streets devastated by war or natural disaster. The sheared and eroding walls used to be considered stockpiles of...Read more

The breathless headline of the January 9, 1901 London Times heralded the discovery of the “Sistine Chapel of the Eighth Century.” The article was written by Gordon Rushfort, the first Director of the British School in Rome, who had been an eye-witness to a sensational event, the re-discovery of...Read more

Emulating Rome’s Pantheon, the Marble Hall at Stowe is one of the great interiors of northern Europe. It is at the heart of the great Stowe House, which itself is at the center of one of the greatest manmade landscapes in England. Almost all the great English architects of the eighteenth century...Read more

Embraced by the dense Argentine rainforest near the Paraguay border, the remains of the seventeenth-century Misión San Ignacio Miní bear silent witness to Jesuit efforts to indoctrinate the region’s indigenous Guaraní, as well as manage Spanish economic interests in South America. Abandoned in the...Read more

To that list of must-see Maya ruins in Mexico and Central America, add the Ennis House in Los Angeles. The temple-like romanza of pyramiding volumes and battered walls designed by Frank Lloyd Wright grows up from a plateau the architect built in the Los Feliz hills overlooking the city.Read more